Like many (future) mothers, Lisette Lopez-Rose imagined that the birth of her child would be the height of happiness. But reality caught up with her: anxiety attacks, constant fear that something bad would happen to her baby, and this stubborn sadness that she couldn’t get rid of. Terrified at the idea of having her toddler taken away from her, she remains silent in front of her obstetrician.
It was only six months after giving birth, discovering testimonials from young mothers with similar symptoms on an online forum, that she decided to notify her doctor. “About two months after starting treatment, I felt like I was coming out of the abyss and seeing the light again»she remembers in the columns of Live Science. This ordeal transformed her: Lisette now works at Postpartum Support International, a support network for mothers in psychological distress.
About one in eight women in the United States experiences postpartum depression, one of the most common complications of motherhood. In France, the situation is even more worrying: a 2023 study assessed the prevalence of psychiatric manifestations two months after childbirth. Result: one in six women had birth-related depression.
UNICEF recalls that this disease generally appears between two and eight weeks after childbirth, a period when hormones drop suddenly, and can last for up to a year. In the United States, the first dedicated drug treatment was only approved in 2019. Here, the European Commission gave the green light last September for the marketing of zuranolone – an anti-depressant treatment suitable for postpartum – authorized since 2023 across the Atlantic.
The start-up myLuma, based in San Diego, has made the fight against postpartum its main focus. The company has developed a blood test capable of predicting the risk of postpartum depression in pregnant women in more than 80% of cases. This test is based on the analysis of biomarkers – molecules present in the blood.
The alteration of two genes involved
“If we have a blood test, we bring psychiatry back to the level of biology»explains Jennifer Payne, a psychiatrist specializing in reproductive health at the University of Virginia. This helps everyone understand that this is a disease that requires treatment, and not just a problem in the mothers’ heads..” Her previous work showed that more than 80% of women with postpartum depression have particular chemical signatures on two genes: increased methylation on one and reduced on the other. Alterations that can be detected throughout pregnancy.
This observation was confirmed in an article published in 2015 in Neuropharmacology, where researchers predicted 80% of cases of postpartum depression in a sample of 240 pregnant women, all without a psychiatric history. The myLuma test takes this scientific basis, adding new biomarkers to increase its reliability.
A test awaiting validation
From January 2026, the test will be available in medical offices in several American states: Florida, Texas and California. Although it has not yet obtained approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), doctors will be able to use it as a decision-making tool. For psychiatrist Samantha Meltzer-Brody, this advance “opens up a whole series of questions about how to take action, so that you don’t have to wait until someone starts to suffer.»
Jennifer Payne is currently leading a large clinical trial intended to confirm the predictive value of the myLuma test. A necessary step to have the green light from the FDA and thus make it available to all pregnant women.
But the test does not detect all cases, as some patients do not present the famous epigenetic signature. Researchers are exploring other indicators that could explain depression following childbirth, such as a drop in certain RNAs involved in autophagy – the physiological mechanism for “cleaning up” cellular debris.
Lisette Lopez-Rose still remembers those months of despair, when she no longer slept, her head full of dark thoughts. Today, her four-year-old daughter is doing wonderfully. A blood test would have warned her of the signs to watch for, “instead of causing me the shock of my depression», she concludes.
